The von Mises and Fisher distributions are spherical analogues to the Normal distribution on the unit circle and unit sphere, respectively. The computation of their moments, and in particular the second moment, usually involves solving tedious trigonometric integrals. Here we present a new method to compute the moments of spherical distributions, based on the divergence theorem. This method allows a clear derivation of the second moments and can be easily generalized to higher dimensions. In particular we note that, to our knowledge, the variance-covariance matrix of the three dimensional Fisher distribution has not previously been explicitly computed. While the emphasis of this paper lies in calculating the moments of spherical distributions, their usefulness is motivated by their relationship to population statistics in animal/cell movement models and demonstrated in applications to the modelling of sea turtle navigation, wolf movement and brain tumour growth.
Moments of von Mises and Fisher distributions and applications.
T. Hillen,K. Painter,A. Swan,A. Murtha
Published 2016 in Mathematical biosciences and engineering : MBE
ABSTRACT
PUBLICATION RECORD
- Publication year
2016
- Venue
Mathematical biosciences and engineering : MBE
- Publication date
2016-11-22
- Fields of study
Mathematics, Medicine
- Identifiers
- External record
- Source metadata
Semantic Scholar, PubMed
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